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  America's narrative on Taiwan needs an update | Brookings Executive summary Despite steady progress on the substance of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship, the narrative surrounding Taiwan in Washington is moving in a dangerous direction. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s warning that Taiwan’s concentration of chip production constitutes a “single point of failure” for the global economy reflects a broader current of thinking that views Taiwan as a vulnerability for the United States. The solution, according to some of Trump’s advisors and supporters, is to rapidly lessen dependence on Taiwan and lower America’s exposure to events in the Taiwan Strait. Left unaddressed, this narrative has the potential to upend decades of American efforts to uphold peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. Narrative, after all, is the master structure within which strategy is formed. This paper offers an update to framing America’s approach to Taiwan and cross-Strait relations. It argues that the...
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  The giant void of nothingness where US financial regulation used to sit ‘There has never been a better time to be a crook’ The M87 supermassive black hole, or the US regulatory edifice? Hard to say © AP Remember “financial regulators”? Yeah, those were the days. FT Alphaville was reminded of that halcyon bygone era by  this cutting overnight commentary  from John Lothian, a Chicago pit trader turned media mogul. It has been 59 days since Michael Selig was sworn in as CFTC chairman. Since then, he has named two senior advisors, a chief of staff, and a general counsel. He has yet to name a single head of any of the divisions that do the nuts and bolts work of the CFTC, or at least are supposed to, assuming there were any employees left to do it. The CFTC full-time employee headcount has been slashed by over 20 percent since the Trump administration took office.  The spirit of the remaining CFTC staff is haunted by the gutting of the CFTC divisions, as evidenced by th...
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  Readers of this blog will know that I have written at length about the paradox of "markets" - prices are public but their makeup are private. The notion of "private markets" is therefore a contradiction within a contradiction! Data Black Holes Leave Policymakers ‘Flying Blind’ in Hunt for Next Crash The rise of private markets has obscured data which regulators and economists rely on to identify risks in the global economy.  Illustration by Grace J. Kim Saved Translate Predicting the next economic crash or financial crisis has always been more art than science. Today there’s an added complication — the increasing paucity of information about what’s really going on in the economy and financial system. The issue was thrown into sharp focus last year during the US government shutdown, when the Federal Reserve was starved of key data from inflation to retail sales and job numbers used to shape monetary policy. Yet the barriers to accessing data on key risks — some wit...
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  This article is an on-site version of the Free Lunch newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up   here   to get the newsletter delivered every Thursday and Sunday. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium   here , or   explore   all FT newsletters Welcome back. In the past few years, the global economy has been battered by a succession of shocks, from wars and rising protectionism to a steep jump in interest rates. Fears of a recession have lingered throughout. But history offers perspective. Excluding the pandemic, there hasn’t been a synchronised global contraction since the 2008 financial crisis. In fact, recent decades stand out for their long, uninterrupted stretches of economic growth. In this edition, I explore why that resilience could be less reassuring than it sounds. “Recessions have got rarer through time,” says Jim Reid, global head of macro research at Deutsche Bank. “The US has only seen four recessions since 1982. But over the previous...
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